Empire in the Air

Abstract

This book is a historical and anthropological study of the racial dimensions of airline travel. It analyzes the colonial beginnings of a seemingly national airline: British Airways. It focuses on the airline’s inauguration as Imperial Airways in the 1920s to its rebranding as the British Overseas Airways Corporation in the 1930s. It pays particular attention to the role that the colonial Caribbean played in the making of transatlantic airline travel, a region that is often left out of early air travel history. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research that was carried out on the ground and while in the air throughout the Atlantic world, it calls attention to race and racism as central to the creation of commercial air travel. It argues that racial oppression was not only a consequence of airline travel. It was also its maker. By attending first and foremost to the role of race in the industry’s inception, the book reveals critical links between empire and airline travel. It blends creative nonfiction with more conventional forms of academic writing in order to highlight the significance of fragmentary evidence, imagination, and diasporic love when seeking to grasp the complexities of aerial mobility and colonialism. In addition to allowing for a critical analysis of race, this uncommon approach makes a case for different researching and reading practices within and beyond history and anthropology. It affords an opportunity to “un-ground” knowledge production and reconfigure how everyday airline travel is understood and experienced as an ordinary cultural practice.